Antarctica in 2010

Ice averaging roughly 2,160 m (7,085 ft) in thickness covers more than 98% of the continent of Antarctica, which has an area of 14 million sq km (5.4 million sq mi). There is no indigenous human population, and there is no land-based industry. Human activity consists mainly of scientific research. The 48-nation Antarctic Treaty is the managerial mechanism for the region south of latitude 60° S, which includes all of Antarctica. The treaty reserves the area for peaceful purposes, encourages cooperation in science, prescribes environmental protection, allows inspections to verify adherence, and defers the issue of territorial sovereignty.

At the 33rd Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting (ATCM), held in Punta del Este, Uruguay, on May 3–14, 2010, approximately 350 diplomats, Antarctic program managers, logistics experts, and polar scientists from 48 countries—including the 28 consultative parties with a scientific presence in Antarctica—gathered to discuss issues ranging from protecting the environment to the effects and implications of climate change for the continent. Representatives of 16 international and intergovernmental organizations also participated as observers. During the ATCM the Committee for Environmental Protection also met and discussed new and revised management plans for Antarctic Specially Protected Areas.

During the 2009–10 austral summer, 36,875 tourists visited the continent, with some 36,303 arriving by ship. Of those, 21,277 landed in the Antarctic Treaty area. About 233 participated in multiday land-based expeditions to the continental interior, and another 345 traveled by air and ship to Antarctica and landed on the continent. In December 2010 the expedition ship Clelia II encountered rough seas while traveling north through the Drake Passage. A wave 9 m (30 ft) high struck the ship, breaking a window, disabling communications, and affecting the engines. No passengers were injured, and as seas calmed, the ship was able to proceed with its transit back to Argentina.

In January 2010 a joint New Zealand and U.S. project that constructed three wind turbines at New Zealand’s Scott Base on Ross Island was dedicated, and in February those generators began to supply electricity to Scott Base as well as to the U.S. McMurdo Station. Engineers estimated that the wind farm would cut fuel consumption by about 463,000 litres (122,000 gal) per year. Wind-generated electricity was expected to account for up to 15% of McMurdo Station’s annual electricity demand but more than 85% of the supply for the smaller Scott Base. Until then, all of the electrical and heat demand for both stations had come from diesel generators and diesel-fired boilers.

South Korea’s first icebreaker, the Araon, made its maiden voyage from Korea to East Antarctica and arrived there in January. The icebreaker was able to continuously break ice one metre (3.3 ft) thick at a speed of 5.6 km/hr (3.5 mph) and could accommodate up to 85 people. During its first trip, scientists conducted research in East Antarctica and searched for a possible location for Korea’s new research station.

During 2010 Russian scientists mapped the bottom of Lake Vostok, the largest-known subglacial Antarctic lake, by using seismic and radar techniques. They found that the lake appeared to be a trough with an irregular bottom. The average depth was 800 m (2,625 ft), with a maximum depth of some 1,050 m (3,450 ft), and it had an area of about 15,500 sq km (6,000 sq mi). Lake Vostok was surrounded by some three dozen smaller subglacial lakes that appeared not to be connected to the larger water body.

In West Antarctica, Pine Island Glacier was rapidly losing mass. The glacier’s flow velocity had nearly doubled since the 1970s, although the cause of this was unclear. American scientists, using a glaciological model, suggested that increased exposure to warm ocean currents was causing the ice shelf to thin and the grounding line (where floating ice meets ice sitting on bedrock) to retreat, increasing the speed at which the ice stream was flowing into the sea. A field study by British investigators used an unmanned submarine to see underneath the ice shelf and found that Pine Island Glacier once sat on a ridge 300 m (980 ft) high. When the glacier was attached to the ridge, the friction restrained the flow of the glacier. The glacier had become detached, however, and the ice flow into the ocean had increased. Pine Island Glacier was in a region where land ice was melting rapidly. Researchers believed that the accelerating seaward flow of West Antarctic glaciers was contributing about 10% of the observed rise in mean sea levels worldwide.

At Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, an international consortium of researchers, using the IceCube neutrino detector, studied the long-standing question of whether the distribution of cosmic-ray bombardment was uneven across the southern sky, as it was in the Northern Hemisphere. Although IceCube was designed to record neutrinos traveling through the Earth when muons were formed from the collision of neutrinos with the ice, the data were dominated by a large background of cosmic-ray muons arriving from above the detector. Using that information, researchers were able to determine that a disproportionate number of cosmic rays were arriving from some parts of the sky but were not evenly distributed.

It was known that ocean bottom water, the coldest seawater, was relatively isolated from warming trends in shallower waters because it took such a long time for water to sink to the bottom. Recent observations, however, showed that bottom water was warming faster than expected. Japanese researchers, using computer simulations, provided insight into the mechanisms that were thought to be speeding up the process. Their simulation postulated a connection between changes in the surface-to-air heat transfer off the Adélie Coast and the warming of bottom water in the North Pacific Ocean, suggesting that the waters around Antarctica had a more significant role in determining how much and how rapidly the atmosphere warmed deep ocean water.

In the Antarctic Peninsula region, scientists had already recorded changes in marine ecosystems caused by ocean warming. Rising ocean temperatures and a corresponding decrease in sea-ice cover was affecting Adélie penguins, which had moved farther south to cooler waters. U.S., British, and Swedish scientists observed a species of king crab moving from the deep ocean into the warming continental-slope region, where the animal community (clams, snails, sea urchins, sea stars) had little protection from their crab predators. Scientists believed that the freezing cold temperatures of the peninsula’s continental shelf waters had previously served as a barrier to the cold-blooded crabs but that rising temperatures along the slope were attracting the deepwater crab species.

Click anywhere inside the article to add text or insert superscripts, subscripts, and special characters.
You can also highlight a section and use the tools in this bar to modify existing content:

Add links to related Britannica articles!
You can double-click any word or highlight a word or phrase in the text below and then select an article from the search box.
Or, simply highlight a word or phrase in the article, then enter the article name or term you'd like to link to in the search box below, and select from the list of results.

Note: we do not allow links to external resources in editor.
Please click the Web sites link for this article to add citations for
external Web sites.